Year-by-year encroachment in the 20th century for cultivation or tree-planting provided the stimulus for the most extensive survey ever undertaken of the archaeological monuments of Bodmin Moor, a previously little-disturbed landscape rich in surviving structural evidence of the many ways, from the Bronze Age to the post-medieval period, in which people settled and exploited the Moor and its surroundings.

The survey is remarkable not only for the extent of the area examined, but also for the number of monuments newly identified in the course of the work.